A Book Day

Today is a day for talking about books, as I have mostly been curled up on the sofa, nestled between Derek and a hot water bottle, chomping down pain relief for stomach cramps and cursing the fickle nature of women and their stupid biology.

After a week of hard reading I have finally finished the third volume of Anthony Powell’s mahoosive; ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’  There are twelve books in total.  I’m reading them in the volumes that divide them into seasons.  I’ve just finished the three books which make up Autumn.  I enjoyed it very much, but will write about my experience of the whole thing when I have finished Winter, hopefully in a week or two.

In the meantime I powered my way through William S. Burroughs ‘Junky’.  This is part of my read more American literature drive.  I’ve never read any Burroughs before, and this was shorter than Naked Lunch, so that’s why I picked it.  If you’re unsure whether you are going to enjoy an author I recommend the practical measure of starting with the novellas first, just in case; and at 160 pages of reasonably large font I would definitely class this as a novella.

It is a very thinly disguised (i.e. he calls himself Bill instead of William) account of Burroughs own early life as a junkie, dealing with how he started using, and finishing just before he shot his wife dead playing a very stupid game of William Tell while out of his mind on dope and speed.

I’ve read my Kerouac and suffered some Ginsberg, so I’m down with the whole Beat thing, but I get the feeling that Burroughs was quite far removed from it all in reality.  It strikes me, from reading his book that actually the thing that mattered most to him in all the world was getting wasted and finding reasons why that was good, and if sticking the label; ‘Beat’ on it, meant that he could continue to obliterate himself on a daily basis, then it was alright by him.  If someone had suggested he call himself a sausagarian and beat himself over the head with a bag of frozen peas he’d have probably gone along with it if they’d kept on allowing him to get wasted.

So what it amounts to is the memoir of a smackhead, and it is as sordid and dreary as you might expect.  It is a series of tales of scoring, failing to score, shooting up, getting nicked, going into rehab, coming out of rehab, falling off the wagon etc.

So far so very, very boring. If you know an addict, or have lived with an addict of any kind you will be aware that the initial frisson of glamour soon wears off and it is indeed rather boring, deeply repetitive and for anyone else except the addict, miserably upsetting as you watch someone you care about squander any skills, personality and abilities they might have.  The thing that saves the addict from this knowledge, and unfortunately prolongs things for the most part, is the fact that they think that while they are doing these things they are actually behaving like a cross between Errol Flynn and Zorro, or, if they are a girl, Marilyn Monroe and Marie Curie, when actually they’re usually quite smelly and fairly dull.

So, don’t expect any romance with Burroughs.  The thing that makes him interesting in this volume is that apart from the odd delusion where he tells you that he is definitely prolonging his life by taking smack, coke, benzedrine and anything else he can inject, snort, chew or drink, he is brutally honest about what it is like to be an addict.  They certainly won’t be handing out the book at the seminar: ‘Be a happy junkie’ that’s for sure.

The other good thing is that he does have a great writer’s eye. His descriptions are wonderful, seedy, horrible, repellant, but really, truly wonderful.  I believe his powers of description got worse as his drinking and drugging got worse, and that his later books are a fair old mess, but this one is lucid, sharp and well crafted.

The second book I have read today is another novella; ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ by James. M. Cain.  It is another American classic, apparently.  It is of the ‘noir’ school, and is consequently rather brutal, quite trashy and thankfully very short.  It consists of the tale of a young drifter who fancies the pants off the wife of a man he works for.  She persuades him to help her bump off the husband, and the rest is as inevitable as Monday mornings always being a bit rubbish.

Apparently this was published in 1934 and was the first of its kind. It is just such a shame that it has been made into films and then written in different formats so often since then that this original story has really lost its power to shock and impress.

At least with me it has.

I haven’t seen the film (don’t all shout at once).  I have seen Bodyheat with Kathleen Turner, and this is that but with more diners in it.  The story is crude and obvious, and you can see the denouement coming from a thousand miles away with ribbons in its hair. The writing, if it were better, would make it tense and exciting no matter what you knew was coming, but the writing is not better.

I suspect it is probably still in print because of the film, and because there are enthusiasts for this kind of fiction, but I am not one of them.  If I’m going to go down the noir route I at least want splendid writing.  I’ll take James Ellroy over this any day, although perhaps I am being unkind to Cain.  Maybe it is the case that if there had been no Cain there would now be no Ellroy.  Who knows?

Whatever.

I don’t care enough to explore any more of Cain’s work, and now I’m definitely not going to see the film. So there.

Next up for the American project is Willa Cather’s, ‘O Pioneers!’ It may be the first American classic I’ve read that has actually been written by a woman.  Which is quite exciting.

For me.

Because I don’t get out much.